Translation exercises in self-study

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BeaP
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Translation exercises in self-study

Postby BeaP » Sun Mar 06, 2022 10:50 am

At school we used to do a lot of translation exercises, and in retrospect I find them very useful. However, the effectiveness might be due to the intensity of the exercise, not translation itself. Also, those exercises were based on a similar reading text and grammar drills, so they were part of a process.

I'm a huge fan of Pierre Capretz (creator of French in Action), and I remember he said in the first episode that translations should be avoided, because the French language is not a translation of the English, and we need to observe how people react (linguistically of course) in different situations.

I've followed Capretz's advice, but recently I've been thinking a lot about inserting translation in my routine. I don't have a tutor, so no-one can correct these translations for me. I'd like to ask those who use translation as a tool the following questions:

1. From which aspects do you find translation effective?
2. How do you use it? What kind of texts do you translate? To your native language and back? How many times?
3. Do you have your translation corrected by someone? If you work alone, how do you know that they're correct?

Thanks in advance for all comments, ideas and advice.
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Re: Translation exercises in self-study

Postby Cavesa » Sun Mar 06, 2022 11:49 am

An excellent thread and subject, thank you!

I find translation exercise extremely useful, they just shouldn't be the majority of what you do. As one of the activities, they are excellent.

1. From which aspects do you find translation effective?

I find it excellent as precision practice. I find that the current trend of the monolingual approach and translation avoidance has the unpleasant side effect of allowing people to take the easy way out all the time. A good translation exercise makes you stick to the message and form. Yes, I totally agree that languages are not exact translations of each other. But I think Pierre Capretz may have been talking about literal translations, which are a problem indeed. Normal translation, therefore trying to find the most exact equivalent (not word by word copy) is very valuable.

2. How do you use it? What kind of texts do you translate? To your native language and back? How many times?

Fortunately for me, some of the high quality Czech based resources, that I use, have translation exercises. Sentences or paragraphs with a key. It is usually pretty clear what are you supposed to practice in general, but of course you will sometimes differ from the key and need to judge whether it is another correct variant or a mistake. Such exercises are very helpful in automatising grammar and vocabulary, in making me leave the comfort zone, and really apply what I've learnt.

I consider doing Assimil as a translation exercise, because there will be no Czech resources from my preferred series for any of the languages I consider taking up next.

For me, there is zero value in exercises of translation to my native language. I occassionally do that for family etc, I am quite good at it, but I am not seeking to become a professional translator now. (Btw I took a medical translation class back at university. Cannot remember in which direction we were going, I think both, but it was interesting)

But yes, I might incorporate some translation from one foreign language to another, and from native language to a foreign one. But It is not a priority exercise at all, and it might lack the very important "key". Hmm, perhaps it might be interesting to get two translations of a book and correct myself?

3. Do you have your translation corrected by someone? If you work alone, how do you know that they're correct?

Nobody. I've got the key to exercises.

And of course, I need to apply my knowledge, to see whether any variation is really such, or a mistake. I use normal reference material at times.

I don't consider paying someone to correct my translation exercises, but I would love to pay someone for high quality feedback to normal writing in the foreign language.
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Re: Translation exercises in self-study

Postby Iversen » Sun Mar 06, 2022 11:59 am

Pierre Capretz has a point, namely that English is different from French, but that's not enough reason to drop translations. However you have to treat the two directions differently. Assuming that you know language A much better than language B you don't have to deliver a 'pretty' translation into language A (unless somebody else has to use it), and then the solution is to make a hyperliteral translation from A to B where you mimick the constructions of B as closely as possible, even if this means that the result isn't even grammatical in language A.

An example: in Standard Danish we can say "du skal gå hen til huset". OK, there is a postclitic definite article here (-et), so to translate "huset" into English you write "houseThe". We have an informal pronoun "du" that actually is the same as the old English "thou" (which now only is used in speaking to your God). We have a "hen til" that tells you that there is a movement (whereas "henne ved" tells you that you already are there) - the English "to" actually contains this information, but sometimes you'll add some more precise information - as in "down to the sea". And "go" is broader than Danish "gå", which assumes that you walk - so use 'walk' here. Finally "skal" means that you 'have to', but maybe not as a direct order. So the final result could be something like "thou shall/must walk (along) to houseThe".

And should you write this down and show it to a teacher of some kind? Probably not, but it shows you what you need to do in your mind if you want to grasp how the B-speakers really think. And once you know that you don't need to do any translation from B to A anymore, unless you are doing it expressly for people who couldn't be bothered to learn language B.

The other way round (from A to B) the goal is different: you want to be able to deliver something really pretty (and correct), and here the goal is to identify and memorize connections between correct expressions and words in language A (which you know well) and correct expressions and words in language B (where you don't know anything much yet). In other words you need to build something like a complete language guide inside your head, where one correct thing in language A has at least one correspondent entity in language B - or in some cases a cluster of possibilities. But once you can survive and think/write/speak coherently in language B this process will be supplemented by learning things directly in language B without the detour around language A, and the end goal is of course to function in language B without using language A at all.

Cavesa wrote:Hmm, perhaps it might be interesting to get two translations of a book and correct myself?

An interesting idea - at least it will tell you how much leeway you have got for your own translations. But it will not tell you whether there is a third 'correct' version of a given passage.
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Re: Translation exercises in self-study

Postby Cavesa » Sun Mar 06, 2022 1:08 pm

Iversen wrote:
Cavesa wrote:Hmm, perhaps it might be interesting to get two translations of a book and correct myself?

An interesting idea - at least it will tell you how much leeway you have got for your own translations. But it will not tell you whether there is a third 'correct' version of a given passage.


You're absolutely right. It is quite possible that the translator may choose a different correct version than the learner (after all, there tend to be significant differences between any two professional translations of the same text).

Which is why I'd recommend such an exercise only from the intermediate level up, and I'd always recommend tons and tons of normal reading, to develop a solid sense for what is probably correct, and what is not.

At the lower levels, the much simpler translation exercises with a key (that are part of some coursebooks and exercisebooks) are much more appropriate.
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Re: Translation exercises in self-study

Postby rdearman » Sun Mar 06, 2022 9:43 pm

Doesn't Luca do something like:

  1. Translate from TL into NL
  2. Wait a couple of days
  3. Translate his translation (Step 1) back into the NL and see how close he is to the original?

Maybe I am wrong. Although this exercise would give you the advantage of having a correct NL sentence to use.
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Re: Translation exercises in self-study

Postby seito » Sun Mar 06, 2022 10:56 pm

I think one reason that "translation" became a dirty word is that it was used so poorly in grammar-translation courses.

Typically, those courses teach you to jump around in a sentence and take it apart, then string the translation together in the other language to produce the end result. This is a very different process from what you would be doing when reading, writing, listening, or speaking. And the result seems to be that the skills it teaches don't translate well into the big four skills.

So I suspect the most important thing is probably the translation method itself. Read a piece of text (at least one sentence) in one language and then write text that expresses the same thought as naturally as you can in the other language. Don't get into the habit of analyzing sentences piece by piece. If you avoid that, I think you'll probably get some benefit from the exercise.
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Re: Translation exercises in self-study

Postby Kraut » Mon Mar 07, 2022 1:39 am

This is what my bidirectional/reverse translations look like, partly very ungrammatical in German, because they serve to hammer the new connection mental image + written word into my memory. It's basically what Iversen describes above. I memorize the complete texts and collect them for revision.
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Re: Translation exercises in self-study

Postby BeaP » Mon Mar 07, 2022 6:42 am

rdearman wrote:Doesn't Luca do something like:

  1. Translate from TL into NL
  2. Wait a couple of days
  3. Translate his translation (Step 1) back into the NL and see how close he is to the original?

Maybe I am wrong. Although this exercise would give you the advantage of having a correct NL sentence to use.


Yes, and he's selling a course called bidirectional translation method. It must be quite complex to be worth a whole course, but for obvious reasons he's not revealing the details. I see a kind of revival of translation in language learning, especially in the self-study area. I wonder if it's only good as the base of a method, or it can be a supplementary exercise in a monolingual approach. Assimil is based on translation for example, and I think Luca, as a long-time proponent of Assimil, might have developed his method on this basis. Or Glossika seems to be similar for me, but without the structure analysis Iversen has written about.

I remember the founder of Glossika said that he created this method because his students only assumed that they knew the meaning of words or phrases, and when he asked them to define their meaning exactly or translate them to their native language, they failed. So basically monolingual resources and methods can lead to learning things the wrong way because of the wrong assumptions and misunderstandings. When you're pushed to translate, these misunderstandings come to the surface and can be corrected.
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Re: Translation exercises in self-study

Postby Sonjaconjota » Mon Mar 07, 2022 9:20 am

rdearman wrote:Doesn't Luca do something like:

  1. Translate from TL into NL
  2. Wait a couple of days
  3. Translate his translation (Step 1) back into the NL and see how close he is to the original?

Maybe I am wrong. Although this exercise would give you the advantage of having a correct NL sentence to use.

I guess the third step would be to translate it back into TL, right?
I've been doing something similar lately while reviewing my Turkish course for beginners.
With every grammar topic the course presents there are at least three to five different exercises with complete sentences, usually of the cloze test kind. The exercises come with the key, so I copy the correct sentences into a document and translate them (with the help of a dictionary or google translate, if necessary) into my native language, German.
I usually use the scriptorium method to familiarize myself with the sentences in Turkish, and a couple of days later translate the German sentences back into Turkish. I correct myself with the key and select only the sentences I got wrong. These I will try to translate again a couple of days later. If I've been especially clueless, I might do another round of scriptorium. Translating the most difficult sentences again and again is a kind of spaced repetition, I guess, although I do not follow any clearly defined intervals.
I see this mainly as a way to review grammar points and memorize structures.
Last edited by Sonjaconjota on Tue Mar 08, 2022 8:18 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Translation exercises in self-study

Postby Kraut » Mon Mar 07, 2022 10:29 am

Olly Richards:
Foreign Language Study Sequences #7: Reverse Translation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VXmDiBfzwA

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David Allen Martin II will come out with an app:

Translation Cubed: A 3-level translation-based methodology

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxFtPzolKlc

My Translation³ web tool does exactly that: It first translates any foreign language text idiomatically (Level 1) and literally (Level 2) into the native language of the learner, so that the text can be instantly understood even by a complete beginner. As a result, learners can choose content based on their interests and preferences from Day 1 rather than being restricted by their current level of proficiency.

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I do the translation myself (desirable difficulty!!) but you can use ELREADER with the DeepL translator
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5gU0AlsLm8
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